Mid-2012 Mac Pro Review

This isn’t the update we were hoping for. In fact, the mid-2012 Mac Pro is barely updated at all. As the last generation of Mac Pro was released in August 2010, we’ve waited almost two years for this refresh, yet its stats have barely moved and innovative technologies introduced in other Macs have failed to make it to Apple’s premium computer.

There are now only two non-server configurations of Mac Pro, the mid-priced model from the previous generation having been dropped. The entry-level model is $2,499 and features a single 3.2GHz quad-core Intel Xeon processor as standard, up from 2.8GHz. The high-end Mac Pro retains its two six-core Xeons, but they’ve actually taken a step backward, running at 2.4GHz instead of 2.66GHz. The price has also dropped, to $3,799 from $4,999. The 2012 Mac Pros have 6GB and 12GB of onboard memory respectively, which is double that offered by their predecessors.

The "new" Mac Pro looks the same as the old Mac Pro-- all the changes ared under the hood.

But the real story of the mid-2012 Mac Pro refresh is what we didn’t get. Every other Mac has a Thunderbolt port. It’s been with us for two generations of MacBook Air and the last three releases of MacBook Pro, but it still doesn’t make an appearance on the Mac Pro. So the only Mac that lacks this exciting new high-speed protocol is the one that needs it most, Apple’s top-of-the-range, pro-level machine.

It hasn’t got USB 3.0 either. High-speed USB made its Mac debut with the mid-2012 notebook refresh, but the new Mac Pro, released at the same time, is still limited to the slower USB 2.0 format. It didn’t get 6Gbps SATA 3, so its hard drives are limited to 3Gbps transfer speeds. And there’s no new graphics card. The ATI Radeon HD 5770 is a powerful beast, but it’s the same one we got with the mid-2010 refresh two years ago.

The bottom line. It’s not that the new Mac Pro is a bad machine--far from it. But the other Macs have moved on, and this refresh sees the tower system losing ground, despite being Apple’s top-of-the-line, pro-level computer. Tim Cook emailed a worried customer that “we are working on something really great for later next year,” so we’re hoping for a proper update in 2013. In the meantime, unless you’re desperate to upgrade, we recommend you wait.